Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

The poem was conceived as an integral work before DGR had an idea to imagine
its subject in pictorial terms. His ideas for a double work began to emerge
early in the 1850s, and gelled into a plan for an elaborate triptych that would interpret Dante's
work and the general significance of his career as it was understood by DGR.
The import of this project can be deduced from the three panels DGR planned
for the triptych: the first would have been Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante, which DGR in fact brought to completion as a watercolor and a finished drawing; the second
would have shown Dante as one of the Florentine magistrates presiding over
the banishment of Cavalcanti; and the third
would have portrayed Dante at the court of his patron Can Grande in Verona.
The second two parts of the triptych never passed beyond the stage of
preliminary sketches.

DGR wrote the poem in an early version between 1848 and 1850, according to
WMR, at which point it was titled “Dante in
Exile” and intended as an introduction to DGR's
translation of the
Vita Nuova
. Conceived in the same spirit as
The Early Italian Poets
and in particular the
Vita Nuova
, the poem investigates Dante and the cultural condition of Italy in
the 13th and early 14th centuries. As such, it also provides DGR with a
vehicle for reflecting on his own immediate social, cultural and artistic circumstances.

The poem is a revisionary critique of that line of Dante scholarship which
represents Dante's relations with his Verona patron Can Grande della Scala
in a favorable light. DGR's poem is strongly critical of Can Grande. Indeed, it represents
itself—this is signalled through its first epigraph—as a
revisionary reading of Canto XVII of Dante's
Paradiso
.

The poem means to function as a text built upon secret or coded texts which
it incorporates into itself. The key passages are those where the poem plays
on the Italian words cane and scala (both of which refer to Can Grande della Scala)
and their English equivalents and associations (dog, stairs). Equally
important is the poem's use of Dante's
Paradiso
XVII. 91-99, where Dante says he received prophetic insights into
Can Grande and his court that he does not reveal in his poem.

It is also important to register the studied archaic quality of the diction
and poetical style. This feature of the poem aligns it closely with DGR's
translations and Art Catholic pastiche works of the same period. It suggests that the narrator of
the poem is not to be seen transparently, as it were the voice of DGR in propria persona. The voice seems a
contemporary (Victorian) one that has been invaded by the spirit of a much
earlier culture.

The later aspect of the poem's style underscores the work's contemporary
social and political relevance. As Ralph Hayward III has shown, this poem
exposes the dialectical relation operating between Dante's artistic and
spiritual interests and his alienated secular circumstances. DGR uses this
view of Dante and his work as a vehicle for arguing a similar relation
between the contemporary artist and the secular Victorian world.

Textual History: Composition

According to WMR, the poem was begun early, perhaps before 1848. It was still
being written in May 1849: WMR's diary for 15 May mentions that DGR “read his poem (in progress) intended as introductory
to the Vita Nuova” (
Fredeman, The P.R.B. Journal, 3
). Although WMR says it may not have been completed until
1852 (
Works (1911), 647n
), it was certainly in some kind of final state by 16 February 1850,
for at that point—as WMR's own diary shows—it was being
considered for publication in
The Germ
(under the title “Dante in
Exile”:
The P.R.B. Journal, 55
). In November it had been read and much praised by Coventry Patmore (
The P.R.B. Journal, 77-78
).

It may have then been revised or augmented or both in preparation for its
inclusion in the projected Dante at Verona, and Other Poems, which was scheduled for publication in 1861 or 1862 as a companion
volume to The Early Italian Poets. DGR cancelled plans to publish the volume of his original poems,
however, and buried this poem with several others in his wife's grave after
her death early in 1862.

Textual History: Revision

DGR had the manuscript of the original version of the poem exhumed from his
wife's grave in late 1869. This text was then printed in the
exhumation proofs
at the end of October 1869, and DGR then set about revising the work
as it passed through various proof states. After its publication in the
first edition of the 1870
Poems
, it was further revised in small particulars through the next six
editions of that volume, and a new stanza was added when the poem was
reissued in the 1881
Poems. A New Edition
.

Reception

Iconographic

“The exiled Dante descending a flight of stairs with
eyes lowered, is stared at by the court jester. Other figures are
roughly sketched on the left” (
Surtees, A Catalogue Raisonée vol. 1, 20).

Printing History

First set in type in the
exhumation proofs
, pulled in late October 1869 from the exhumed manuscript. The text
was then reprinted and revised through the subsequent proof states toward
its eventual first publication in the 1870
Poems
. It was reprinted and collected thereafter.

Historical

The poem centers in the period of Dante's second sojourn in Verona (ca.
1314-1318) after his exile from Florence in 1302. It recovers and glances at
various events of the period of Dante's life (1265-1321), in particular
events associated with Florence and the factional struggles that occurred in
Italy and her cities.

The subject of “Dante at
Verona” also functions as a kind of objective correlative
for the situation of the artist in mid-Victorian England. A satiric
investigation of Verona's cultural condition, it necessarily also casts
these satirical reflections forward to DGR's own country and culture.

Literary

The poem represents itself—through its first epigraph—as
a revisionary reading of Canto XVII of Dante's
Paradiso
. In a sense the poem is a revelation of the prophetic words that
Cacciaguida spoke to Dante but that, according to Canto XVII, were not made
part of the prophecy incorporated in Canto XVII (see lines 91-96 of Canto
XVII). Aware of the received historical tradition that Dante was an
enthusiast of Can Grande's generosity and intelligence, DGR's poem comes as
a revelation of a fuller and very different truth. As such, it clearly seeks
to align itself with the prophetic character of the
Commedia
itself, and especially with its political attitudes and objects.

The presence of the anecdote recorded in lines 295-306 is important for
helping to correct the widespread and mistaken view that DGR and his father
read Dante in opposite ways. While it is true that Gabriele Rossetti
downplayed the historical Beatrice in favor of an arcane allegorical
meaning, and DGR focused on the historical lady, their methods of reading
Dante have much in common. First of all, by recalling this recondite story
in the poem DGR illustrates his father's general approach to reading Dante
as secret political allegory. It also (secretly) deploys Gabriele Rossetti's
most notorious exegetical method: reading for double-meanings via plays on
words and syntactical ambiguities. Gabriele Rossetti's oblique presence in
this poem underscores an influence that most scholars of DGR's works have
failed to recognize. In fact, when DGR came to publish his 1870
Poems
, where this work figures so prominently, the only family member who
stands out in the book is Gabriele Rossetti. (DGR includes two sonnets that
relate to his father's Dantist studies—
“Dantis Tenebrae”
is particularly pointed—and he went out of his way to wrap
his book in a secret paternal sign: the decorated endpapers reproduce paper
that Gabriele Rossetti brought with him to England when he was exiled from Italy.)

The poem's chief antecedent English text is Byron's
The Prophecy of Dante
, which also takes up the question of the function of the artist in
society in the form of a prophetic satire. Carlyle's lecture on Dante,
published in
On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
(1840), is also a clear influence. Of DGR's works, and besides
The Early Italian Poets
translations, the relevant texts are the contemporary
socio-political commentaries
“The Burden of Nineveh”
and
“Jenny”
. Equally important related texts are
“Hand and Soul”
and
“Saint Agnes of Intercession”
. All of these are works that date back to the late 1840s.

Autobiographical

Everything Dantean that DGR wrote or executed pictorially has
autobiographical significance, since he strove to reimagine Dante's life and
work as a mythic forecast of his own life and work.